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Friday, February 11, 2011

Field Report - Sometimes it's just going to fail

I love my guildies, and we have been doing really well in our raiding progress. We've downed everything on 10 man so far, and only got Al'Akir and Nefarian left in 25 man. That doesn't mean we can't have some raid nights of pure failure. They're fun too, in their own way.

It all started like a regular raid night. A couple of people didn't show up, we had to replace, some were grumpy because they were put on the bench, same old same old. Since we now had cleared all raiding content at least once on 10 man, we had decided to check out Halfus on hc. How tough could he be? We had our two priests for the evening respec to a proper "kick-Halfus-ass"-spec, which basically meant we were going to spam Smites and healer people through Atonement. I don't usually use Atonement at all, so it meant to respec for me, but I didn't mind.

Maybe this was the first sign that this was going to be a failraid.

So we got there and after some discussions we started the fight. About 4 seconds laters everyone were beat to a pulp. Ok, what had just happened? People didn't really agree, some said it was the healing, some said it was the lack of cooldowns. Bad positioning? Maybe we should switch the tanks around? I didn't think about much, since my role was to spam smites on Halfus in any case. We got our asses whooped a couple of more times, tried different tactics, it didn't make much of a difference. On the bright side however my smite spamming worked really well. Me and the other priest (who usually plays shadow) were on some ~20k hps with regular 40-70k Atonement crits going around. Needless to say, I had fun at least!

After a couple of wipes we decided that we had gotten enough beating for one evening and proceeded to kill him on normal instead. We had a quick break during which I respecced back to my old disc spec and continued to kick Halfus ass. That wasn't so difficult was it?

What proved to be difficult however was the trash between Halfus and Valiona & Theralion. I think we wiped on them some... 5 times? Seriously. Our raid leader (Love) took careful time to mark everything up and make sure everyone knew what to cc. And still cc was broken all over the place, one of the tanks went to grab a mob and woops, is that another pack we just pulled? Yeah, it was. Ok wipe it, do it over and do it better.

We pulled the group, cc was broken all over the place, someone feared. Oh, is that two other trash packs we just pulled? Yes, yes it is. Ok, wipe it up. What's the matter with you people?! Don't fear without glyph in a small area with loads of trash everywhere. Geeses, you thought we were all just randomly pressing our skills here or something.

We pulled the group, cc wasn't broken, but what is this? We still get the trash pack from way over there? Ok, who are we blaiming now? Hard to say, since the trash was like 60 yards away. Who has skills that will pull them from that far? Everyone looks at the hunter and warlock and their pets. Wipe!

We pulled the group, no one dpses or anything, careful, careful now. Wait what? The other trash pack from way over there comes eventhough we haven't even been close to them?! Great, the room is bugged. Just what we needed. Wipe!

Now we reset the instance which means we have to reclear the trash we just had killed. I think the trash before V&T took some hour this evening, which was... interesting. But we finally made it all the way to V&T. And that try didn't go too shabby. Except that the first person with the Blackout ran away from the raid instead of into it, which meant he died. But I think he had misunderstood our tactic from our last try here, poor guy. Other than that people generally moved from bad stuff and did their thing.

New trash before Ascendant Council. New fails? You betcha. The first two dragonkin trash aren't too bad, but then you get to the elementals just before AC. I don't think anyone likes those. I say "don't worry guys, I'm not holy, so all white circles on the ground are bad stuff". That didn't help much as people stood in them anyway. We didn't actually wipe on them, we just had very many people die on our first pull. But me and another healer, and two tanks survived and everyone else ran in. So no wipe! We finished the rest of that trash in a fairly decent manner.

Then we got to AC. It's not that tricky of a fight, and we usually wipe on the simplest thing - the Lightning Rods in phase 2. You get this huge arrow over your head indicating that you don't move away from people you will probably kill them. It's extremely easy to avoid, and therefore quite punishing if you fail on this. We failed loads of time on this last time we were here, so we thought people would've learned this by now. And yet we managed to wipe some... 3 times? Before we got this one down. We got the kill in AC exactly as the raid ended. Sometimes you need the fail raids to enjoy the good ones.

3 comments:

Some nights are just jinxed and there's naught you can do about them. the best is to laugh and shrug them off really - and I think it's after nights like those, when you can see what your guildies are made of. even the best team can fail sometime, what counts is how you deal with failure.

About Me

I'm Zinn, former healing priest extraordinaire of WoW, which I played between April 2005- April 2013. Nowadays I spend my days playing other games, reading loads of stuff and writing the occassional blog post about it. Enjoy!